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Today, Darth Vader rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. He was accompanied by stormtroopers as R2-D2 worked the floor.

via io9

The design blog Dornob has a post describing flooring made from recycled leather belts, including rugs and floor tiles. They're pricey, at about $70 per square foot. So Dornob suggests that you could make your own:

If you are looking for a cheaper alternative approach, however, local vintage clothing stores may sell a belt for a few dollars. After finding a few choice samples, it is just a matter of figuring out the best way to put them together. For the do-it-yourself craft-oriented individual, part of the fun lies in the creative process – choosing the right hues of faded black, brown, red and orange like in the first (wonderfully muted-but-colorful) example.

Link via DudeCraft

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Engineer Carl Morgan's son complained that a certain hill was too hard to climb on his bicycle. Could his dad invent a machine to help him power over these inclines? The answer came in "Joules", an electrically-powered robot that rides in the back seat of a tandem bicycle:

Morgan spent months modeling how to transform a motor’s spin into pedal-pushing legs. The motor inside Joules’s torso turns a series of linked belts and chains that transfer power from one area of the robot to the next. Each upper leg pivots at the hip, raising and lowering its knee and forcing the lower legs to turn the pedals. He also added “bones” (rods on the outside) for needed stiffness.

Morgan was nervous when he climbed in front for the final test, but Joules easily cruised to the top of the hill. The bike could probably do more, even hit 30 mph, but Morgan says he doesn’t plan to find out: “Abject cowardice on my part means we’ll never know for sure.”

http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2009-12/robot-buddy-your-bicycle-built-two | Official Website

The artblog A Journey Around My Skull has a compilation of unusual and surreal illustrations from children's books of the Soviet Union. This image is from the 1989 book Hello, I'm A Robot Stanislav Zigunenko and illustrated by E. Benyaminson. At the link, you'll see the first post in a series about such illustrations.

Link via Gizmodo

At New Scientist, Michael Marshall describes ten hypothetical technologies that could propel spacecraft at greater distances and higher speeds than ever before. These aren't warp drives and hyperspace wormholes, but real science. One example is the ion thruster, which may be just a few years away from actuality:

Conventional rockets work by shooting gases out of their rear exhausts at high speeds, thus generating thrust. Ion thrusters use the same principle, but instead of blasting out hot gases, they shoot out a beam of electrically charged particles, or ions.

They provide quite a weak thrust, but crucially they use far less fuel than a rocket to get the same amount of thrust. Providing they can be made to keep working steadily for a long time, they could eventually accelerate a craft to high speeds.

They have already been used on several spacecraft, such as Japan's Hayabusa probe and Europe's SMART-1 lunar mission, and the technology has been improving steadily.

A particularly promising variant is the variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket (VASIMR). This works on a slightly different principle to other ion thrusters, which accelerate the ions using a strong electric field. Instead, VASIMR uses a radio-frequency generator, rather like the transmitters used to broadcast radio shows, to heat ions to 1 million °C.

Link via Gizmodo | Image: NASA

The innovative designs by Russian advertising and design firm Art Lebedev have been previously featured on Neatorama, including a pessimistic piggy bank, a spreadsheet grill, a Tetris magnet set, an ice tray that spells out the word "eternity", a clock that spells out the time, a Batman clothespin, a clock built into a whiteboard, and a piggy bank shaped like a gravity bomb. Their latest advertising gimmick, intended to encourage safe driving, is a see-through tractor trailer. A camera on the front of the truck captures what's going on ahead and projects it on a screen on the back of the trailer. It's called "Transparentius."

Official Website via DVICE

We've previously featured Facebook status updates from the characters of Star Wars and DC Comics heroes. Now Jason Michaels of College Humor puts the characters of The Lord of the Rings through the same treatment. Five more at the link.

http://www.collegehumor.com/article:1796048 via Geekologie

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We've previously mentioned the full-size house made out of LEGO blocks by UK television host James May. It was demolished shortly after the completion of construction, but in this video, you can see what it was like to live inside of it. May attempted to shower, shave, and go to sleep in the house and learned that LEGO might not be an ideal building material.

via Geekologie

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Sony Ericsson hosted a promotional tennis tournament that was bathed in ultraviolet light in order to recreate the atmosphere of the movie Tron. It's far more scenic than the Medieval version.

via DVICE

For her senior project in 2002, Molly Epstein of Temple University made a glass-filled nylon necklace that looks like a set of vertebrae. Epstein specializes in synthesizing jewelry and medicine:

During her time at UW, she actively associated herself with engineers and doctors in an ongoing quest to understand what an artist may contribute to medical science. She has literally narrowed the gap between the disciplines by collaborating with Doctor Richard Hopper from Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center on the Patent Pending SAM Device. The Seattle Alar Molding Device is a nasal molding device for children born with varying degrees of the cleft palate deformity. She was also a research assistant for Dr. Murray Maitland from Rehabilitation Medicine at UW and helped bring to life a modified prosthetic hand device.

http://www.temple.edu/crafts/public_html/mjcc/local/gallery/student/Cad_gal_stu.htm via Make | Information about the Artist

The Viking Lady, owned by the Norwegian shipping firm Eidesvik, has a 320-kilowatt molten carbonate fuel cell that powers the 9,500 ton vessel. It's the first ship to ever use fuel cell technology:

But in the case of the 5,900 metric ton Viking Lady, Norwegian shipping company Eidesvik and its partners have gone further, installing a 320-kilowatt molten carbonate fuel cell that operates on liquefied natural gas (and can be reconfigured, if necessary, to run on methanol). Storage tanks for the hydrogen and carbon dioxide that gets the fuel cell started press up against the stern of the 92.2 meter-long ship (in case of explosion) as do the machines to regasify the fuel. The fuel cell operates at 650 degrees Celsius and is warm to the touch, even on a blustery, frigid day in Copenhagen's harbor.[...]

The investment was made, in part, to get an understanding of fuel cell technology and how it might be applied to shipping, according to DNV's Viking Lady project head Tomas Heber Tronstad. Initial estimates are that such fuel cells would cut CO2 emissions from an individual ship by 50 percent. But the investment was also made because Norway has a tax on nitrogen oxide emissions that paid an immediate return for installing gas rather than diesel engines, says Eidesvik CEO Jan Fredrik Meling. Compared to a traditional ship, even without using the fuel cell, the Viking Lady reduces nitrogen oxide emissions by 90 percent, CO2 emissions by 20 percent and eliminates sulfur dioxide and soot emissions.

Link | Photo: Fellowship

With an American and a Russian colleague, Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi launched into space today in a Soyuz spacecraft, bringing with him the first sushi ever taken into orbit:

"We had training in Japan and I trained (my space colleagues) to be sushi lovers, so I am going to make a couple of flavors of sushi," Noguchi told a press conference ahead of Monday's launch of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

"...Some sashimi, and raw fish and sushi and I will bring that up to the space station to share with my crew."

According to NASA, normal fare on the space station includes staples like mushroom soup, macaroni and cheese, or chicken and rice.

On the Russian side, there is tinned perch, curds with nuts and beetroot soup (borscht) sucked through a straw from a plastic bag.

If you were going up, what food would you take with you?

Link via Popular Science | Photo: NASA

Sure, anyone can make a gingerbread house. But what would be the result if it was built by true professionals? The Vancouver-based art collective Creative Room held a charity art competition and asked for contributions by architectural firms. Their task was to build a modernist model home out of gingerbread. Pictured above is "Candy Bar" by Busby, Perkins & Will. At the link, you can view a gallery of the other winners.

Link via DudeCraft | Busby, Perkins & Will

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In the 1990s, Seikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates decided to build a giant pickup truck. The result was a truck modeled on the 1950s era Dodge Power Wagon (apparently an iconic vehicle in his country) precisely 64 times larger than the original. It contains a full suite of rooms and can actually drive. The video clip above is from Jeremy Clarkson's BBC documentary series Motorworld.

Link via Ace of Spades HQ

When microbiologists aren't curing diseases, they create works of art in petri dishes. In fact, they have an annual competition at the international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) conference. This entry, inspired by Super Mario Bros., was submitted by the nanobiology laboratory at the University of Osaka. You can view a gallery of petri dish art at the link.

via Popular Science

UPDATE 12.20.09: Apparently we're having virus problems, so I deleted the link. I would not have guessed that New Scientist would be a bad risk.